Albany, NY - March 28, 2012 - (Photo by Joe Putrock/Special to the Times Union) - Pulitzer Prize winning author and event performer William Kennedy talks with friends before taking the stage during the Music Mobile's 34th Anniversary Benefit Celebration. less

Albany, NY - March 28, 2012 - (Photo by Joe Putrock/Special to the Times Union) - Pulitzer Prize winning author and event performer William Kennedy talks with friends before taking the stage during the Music ... more

The souls peopling William Kennedy novels have always had an operatic streak about them: tragically flawed, larger than life, haunted by death (or dead already). And they have issues If, as W.H. Auden observed, opera is "an imitation of human willfulness," then the classic Kennedy protagonist is prime meat for operatic adaptation.

Consider Roscoe Conway, the complex and fleshy political insider at the heart of "Roscoe," a new opera scheduled for an Opera Saratoga workshop performance at 2 p.m. Sunday at Skidmore College. Adapted from the Kennedy novel by Albany composer Evan Mack and Tennessee-based librettist Joshua McGuire, the opera is about half-written: Only the 80-minute Act I will be performed in Sunday's unstaged concert rendering, sung by members of the company's Young Artist Program. "It's quite wonderful. It's thrilling to listen to it, and to hear these voices when they start taking off," Kennedy said. Opera struck him as a "very good form for Roscoe himself. As an individual, he has kind of an operatic life, and he is a creature of extreme habits and proclivities. And he reaches great heights as a politician and as a human being, and he has a great rise and fall of his emotions."

That said, Kennedy noted, "It's totally new to me. I've never been involved in opera in any way whatever. I mean, I was an usher at 'Aida' when it played the Palace in 1943 ... but I don't think being an usher qualifies as a serious involvement."

At a rehearsal Saturday morning at Skidmore's Zankel Music Center, Mack sat alongside conductor Laurie Rogers and director Maggie Mancinelli-Cahill as the cast ran through a chunk from the start of the opera. Baritone Mitchell Hutchings, singing Roscoe, squared off against the chorus in a jazzy ricochet riffing on the old Democratic machine.

"An improbable city of political wizards!" he sang, and the chorus replied: "Al-ba-ny!"

"Splendid nobodies!" he sang, and the chorus replied: "Al-ba-ny!"

"Underrated scoundrels!" he sang, and the chorus replied: "Al-ba-ny!"

For Opera Saratoga, "Roscoe" was a gimme. "The fact that a local composer based this on a novel by a very well-known local writer with a local history — in as much as it deals with Albany from the 1940s political scene — it's hard to pass up," said Curtis Tucker, the company's general director. "It's just a lot of local connections. So it just seemed to be a really good fit."

It fit Kennedy, too. "It seemed like a good idea, and I was glad to do it," said the novelist, who's seen his works adapted into other forms. The Pulitzer Prize-winning "Ironweed" became a 1987 film starring Jack Nicholson and Meryl Streep. Both "Roscoe" and "Legs" became musical works by composer Kevin Beavers — the former a violin concerto, the latter a tone poem — performed by the Albany Symphony Orchestra.

Mack and McGuire collaborated on an earlier opera, "The Secret of Luca," which premiered this spring in Fresno, Calif. That, too, was adapted from a book — a 1956 novel by Italian author-politician Ignazio Silone. "Roscoe" came to be when Mack, smitten with Kennedy's universe of scoundrels and nobodies, turned to the 2002 novel based on Albany's colorful and convoluted history. He liked its love story, its socio-political underpinnings, its humor. "Not everything has to be so damned serious, you know? And 'Roscoe' — I picked it up and read it, and it just jumped off the page."

He reached out to the New York State Writers Institute. "And a couple hours later, my cellphone rings. 'Evan Mack, it's Bill Kennedy.' You know, I just dropped the phone!"

That was about a year ago. Since then, composer and librettist have met with Kennedy in two-scene chunks, gathering at his home in Averill Park or — once — at his digs on 67 Dove St., the building where gangster Jack "Legs" Diamond was shot as he slept off a night of partying in 1931. Mack had just written a Legs-related aria for the opera, and "It was wild. Here I am, singing to Bill Kennedy 'The Ballad of Legs Diamond' in the room where Legs Diamond was killed. ... It was really cool. It was mind-blowing." But no ghost appeared. "It did not. I kept looking around, hoping it would pop out any minute, but it didn't happen."

Was that night surreal for Kennedy, too? "The whole thing is kind of hitting me as a surreal experience. Because you know, you have to imagine somebody singing with great verve and power of these mundane events — like being killed in bed in your underwear."

And while Kennedy minimized his role in the opera's creation ("The only thing I'm doing is sort of touching up the language here and there"), McGuire described his input as "wonderful — not only as an education in craft for me, as a writer, but also an education in the world of Albany history. I mean, the guy knows everything It's freaky."

In Mack and McGuire's vision, the first act includes a balcony of the dead where spectral presences interact with the living. The bouncing among the living, the dead and the eras they occupy — rooted on V-J Day in 1945, and flashing back from there — also allows for a variety of musical idioms, Mack said.

Felix, for instance. Roscoe's father. His life and musical influences hark back to the late 1800s, "so he's more of a Gilbert and Sullivan kind of guy. And Elisha — he's another dead character — he's clearly traced in the jazz genre. And they talk about him babbling a lot of the time, so to me that meant scat-singing."

The breathing and the not-anymore were both audible at Saturday's rehearsal, where the jazzy exchanges continued between Roscoe and others. After one such snippet with one such character, Mack was asked to confirm his status. Is he dead?

"Yeah," he said. "He's dead. He's dead."

Mancinelli-Cahill nodded. "So Roscoe's having a conversation with the dead guy," she said, restating the fact with unvarnished calm. This is Kennedy, after all. Confabs with the incorporeal are business as usual.

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And then all of them, both the living and the dead, went back to singing.